One of the things we've done, which we started early in the pandemic, was to simply work with providers—partners around the world and commercial providers—to take down anybody that was impersonating the Government of Canada. I think we've all gotten the calls from someone pretending to be from a government agency. The same thing happens on the Internet, where you get emails, etc. We've taken down over 4,000 of these since March. It's something we did to try to decrease the amount of fraud that's happening.
The second thing that we've also tried to do is to raise awareness. We did some joint public awareness campaigns with the RCMP and the Canadian Anti-Fraud centre to get information out to Canadians to say, “Hey, look for this, because here's something we're seeing.” We've really tightened up the path of communications there in terms of making sure that information is being shared quickly and is getting out to Canadians so they can know what to be aware of and what is the latest scam.
The third piece, though, is that we have been working with telecommunications companies as Canadians report spam. For anything that's related to the Government of Canada, we've been able to proactively put things in place. For example, on the programs that the government has put in place in terms of the CERB or some of the other response benefits, we're ensuring that we know what those look like ahead of time so that we can pre-position fraud detection. If somebody tries to pretend to be the CERB site to try to get information, we have commercial providers that are looking for that proactively to take it down before any Canadian is victimized.
We're really trying to get ahead of the curve. It's something where we've really relied on those government departments that are responsible for delivery to get that out there.
Finally, we're also telling everybody to go to the root of the truth. If you're looking for the facts, go to the place to get the real facts. In a pandemic situation, Ottawa Public Health, Public Health Ontario and the Public Health Agency of Canada are those roots of truth for me. They'll obviously be different wherever you're—